In high speed digital communication systems, it is important to be able to rapidly and reliably determine the loss of an incoming signal transmitted to a receiver circuit over the communication channel of a communication system. Accordingly, receiver chip sets or chips are often provided with circuitry which is adapted to monitor a signal level of the incoming signal of the digital data bit stream or data stream to determine whether the data stream is present or not and provide a Loss of Signal (LOS) detect signal indicating whether the data stream is present or absent. Often, this LOS detect signal is transferred to a system processor or network controller running a suitable monitoring program, monitoring the operation of the communication system, which may be adapted to take corrective steps in response to an activated LOS detect signal.
In fast optical data network environments when receiving an optical signal from an optical fiber, a photodiode is used to translate the signal from the optical domain to the electrical domain. A transimpedance amplifier (TIA) is often used to thereafter translate an electrical current received from the photodiode to an electrical voltage. Since the typical output voltage of most TIAs is considerably less than 100 mV, a limiting amplifier is required to square up the signal and amplify it to a level that can be clocked and interpreted by a data recovery unit. Many physical media device (PMD) receiver chipsets typically implement the LOS detect or alarm feature in the Limiting Amplifier (LIA). Customer specifications may need to set the threshold of LOS from as low as 5 mV to the upper range of 200 mV. Unfortunately, present LIAs have difficulties meeting this wide input range.